


Postcards from London

by Kriegsandharris



Category: Florence + the Machine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24613855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kriegsandharris/pseuds/Kriegsandharris
Summary: After a history of violence, Isabella Summers is recruited to a secretive organization to carry out assassinations. Florence Welch is a talented soprano who quickly becomes obsessed with finding the assassin who murdered the man who funded her music education at one of her performances. Chaos ensues.In other words: Killing Eve but make it Florabella.Based on the show "Killing Eve" and the book "Codename: Villanelle" by Luke Jennings.
Relationships: Isabella Summers/Florence Welch
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Postcards from London

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is based on Killing Eve/Codename, but you definitely don't have to be familiar with either of those to follow along. A lot of this chapter is heavily based on/from Luke Jennings' writing.

Somewhere hidden deep in the mountains of Italy, twelve men gather around a table, talking pleasantries as a warm June breeze floats through an open window. They all look ordinary enough, if not successful in their quietly expensive suits. They are all well groomed, in their late fifties or early sixties judging the grey hairs appearing in their neatly cut beards. A large table is set with fine cutlery, which begins its clanging once the first dishes are brought out. 

The morning passes among all of the discussion happening, which is conducted in German and English, the languages common to all those present.

Once lunch is finished, the men convene on the terrace, pouring themselves coffee to their liking and eating the assortment of pastries served on silver platters off to the side. Before long, they return to the conference room. Notably, there are no security people, as they become a risk at a meeting with this level of secrecy.

Folders are passed out, each containing the meeting’s agenda, simply headed “EUROPE.”

The first speaker is as plain looking as the rest, dressed in a grey suit with a neat blue tie. “This morning, gentlemen, we discussed the economic future of Europe. We talked about the flow of capital and how it can be controlled. I would now like to speak to you about a much different economy.” The room darkens slightly as the blinds are closed, revealing an image of a Mediterranean port with many container ships.

“This, gentlemen, is the principal point of entry for cocaine into Europe. The result of a strategic alliance between Mexican drug cartels and the Sicilian Mafia.”  
There are questions asked and the man patiently answers, until he asks for a moment to explain. “Salvatore Greco has resurrected a dangerous Sicilian clan. He has murdered at least sixty people, and has ordered the death of hundreds more. His enterprises, worldwide, turn over some twenty to thirty billion dollars. Gentlemen, he is practically one of us.”

The room alights with amusement and quiet murmurs before the presenter speaks again. 

“The problem with him is not his predilection for torture and murder, but rather, his ordering of the assassination of members of the establishment. He’s killed two judges, five magistrates, all by car bombs, and a journalist, who was gunned down in her own home.” He pauses, progressing the projected presentation to reveal an image of the dead woman, in a pool of blood on top of a wooden floor. 

“Needless to say,” he continues, “it has not been possible to implicate him in any of these crimes. Police have been bribed, witnesses intimidated—he is untouchable. Only a month ago I sent an intermediary to arrange a meeting with him during his down-time in London, and his response was immediate.” Again, he clicks a button to progress the presentation, this time revealing an assortment of severed body parts. “I received a package containing my associate’s eyes, ears, and fingers. The message was fairly clear then: no meeting, no discussion, no accommodation. It is time we make an executive decision regarding this man. He is a dangerously uncontrollable force, and beyond the reach of the law. His criminality and blatant disregard for human life threaten the stability of the Mediterranean sector. I propose we have him removed immediately.”

Rising from his chair, the speaker walks to a table to the side of the projector and picks up an antique lacquered box. Taking out a velvet drawstring bag, he pours its contents on the table in front of him, revealing twenty four stones, twelve of them clear, and twelve of them a dark blood-red. Each man receives a pair of stones

The velvet bag makes its way around the table counter-clockwise, then, when it has made a full revolution, it is passed to the man who proposed the vote. The contents of the bag are poured onto the dimly gleaming surface of the table. Twelve red stones. A unanimous sentence of death. 

—

Two weeks later, Machina is sitting at an outside table of a private club in Berlin. The club is surrounded by lush gardens, whose flowers infuse the air with a sweet scent. The sun is setting, leaving a soft orange and purple glow to reflect across the city. 

Machina takes a long sip of her martini, discreetly surveying her surroundings. She takes note of a couple at the next table over. Both are in their mid-twenties, maybe just slightly younger than her. 

She’s gotten used to this need for constant surveillance—she isn’t Isabella anymore. Her life is constantly in danger. 

Not in danger enough, though, to not engage with the attractive couple when the woman catches her staring and raises her champagne flute in response. 

“Would you like to join us?” she asks. 

Machina stares back, unblinking. She hesitates for a moment, trying to quickly calculate every possible way in which this could go wrong. 

“You can say no, it’s okay,” the man adds with a small, calm smile when they are met with silence. 

Machina stands, taking her glass with her. “I’d love to,” she says confidently with the British accent she had worked so hard to perfect. She hated how many people spoke exclusively English in Berlin—she had specifically picked the city so she could speak her native German, after all. 

“Olivier,” the man politely introduces himself, “and this is Nica.”

“Florentina,” Machina effortlessly replies. 

“What a pretty name,” Nica responds with a smile. 

The conversation unfolds conventionally. Olivier, she learns, has recently launched a career as an art dealer, while Nica works intermittently as an actress. There is something about them that almost bothers Machina about the two of them—she isn’t sure if it is how effortlessly they bounce off each other’s ideas, or the slight erotic energy engulfing the two of them.

“So what do you do?” Olivier eventually asks, snapping Machina out of her trance.

“Oh, I’m a day-trader, boring stuff,” she responds. 

“So what brought you here? From…?”

“London,” she finishes for Nica. “Better jobs, more opportunities.” The posh accent coming out of her mouth makes her feel almost sick. 

“Well, we love your name, and your eyes, and your hair, and most of all we love your style,” Nica responds, clearly picking up on the fact “ _Florentina_ ” isn’t interested in talking about herself. 

Machina laughs, flexing her feet in her strappy satin Louboutins. She makes a conscious effort to mirror their posture, stretching her small frame to reflect their long and slender necks and arms. 

Just as the night begins to go dark, Olivier speaks: “I have a suggestion,” he says, looking between Machina and Nica with lustful eyes. Just as he begins to finish his thought, though, Machina’s bag begins to blink. Apologetically, she picks it up and fishes out her phone to reveal a one-word text: DEFLECT. She stands up, and without any explanation, quickly leaves her new friends behind. In less than a minute, she is out of the club and swinging into the early-night traffic on her Vespa. 

It’s been almost years since she first met the man who sent her the text. The man who, to this day, she only knows as Mikel. Her circumstances, then, were very different. Her name was Isabella Janet Florentina Summers, or Isa for short, as she would tell her friends—a real mouthful compared to her current moniker—and she was due to sit her finals as a student of Linguistics at University of Salzburg in Austria. It was unlikely, however, that she would ever walk into the university’s examination hall as, since the previous autumn, she’d been unavoidably detained elsewhere. Specifically in the Graz-Karlau, a prison all the way across the country in a remote forest. Accused of murder.

It’s a short drive on her Vespa to her apartment in Moabit. After parking the Vespa alongside her car, Machina takes the lift to the sixth floor, and quickly trots up the short flight of stairs to her rooftop apartment. Her front door is made with the same panelling as the others in the building, but is reinforced with steel— _for her own protection_ , Mikel had told her. Inside, the apartment is comfortable and spacious, strewn with items collected from various parts of the world that she had gotten from charity shops around Berlin, as well as her own travels. 

No one ever visits her here—professional meetings take place in cafes and public parks, her sexual liaisons are mostly conducted in hotels—but if they were to do so, the apartment would bear out her cover story in every small detail. In the study, her computer, an outrageously expensive top end piece of equipment, is protected by civilian security software that a decent hacker with an entry-level degree in computer science could quickly bypass. However, a scan of its contents would reveal little more than the details of a successful day-trading account, and the contents of the filing cabinet to the left are similarly non-committal. There is no music system—music, for Machina, is at best a pointless irritation to her ears and at worst, a serious threat to her life. In silence lies safety. 

—

Conditions at Graz-Karlau were unspeakable. The food was inedible, sanitation was non-existent, and the cold made her hands a cool, pale color come nights. The slightest infraction of the rules resulted in a prolonged period of _Einsam_ , or solitary confinement. Isa had been there for three months when she was ordered from her cell, marched to the prison courtyard, and ordered to climb into the trunk of a battered all-terrain vehicle. Two hours later, deep in the mountains near Styria, the driver abruptly stopped by a bridge, and wordlessly pointed towards a small, prefabricated unit, beside which a black four-wheel-drive Mercedes was parked. Inside the small unit, there was just enough room for a table, two chairs, and a small space heater.

A man in a heavy grey coat was sitting on one of the plastic chairs, and to begin with, he just stared at her. He was older, she immediately realized, probably in his late forties or early fifties, and wore an oversized black parka over a grey sweater and plain, black pants. It was a very practical outfit, Machina thought as he took in her navy prison uniform, her gaunt features, her long, dark hair, her incredibly small frame that couldn’t be much more than five feet tall. “Isabella Florentina Janet Summers,” he said eventually, consulting a printed folder on the table full of papers. “Age, twenty-three years and four months. Accused of triple homicide, with multiple aggravating circumstances,” he added with a tilt of his head and a slight, amused smile. The tiny girl in front of him was not what he expected when he had first read the file. 

She waited, staring out of the small window at a square of snowy rock. Though this man was ordinary enough looking, she knew at one glance that he could not be manipulated like others. 

“Two weeks from now, you will face trial,” he continued in German, “and you will be found guilty. There is no other conceivable outcome, and in theory you could be sentenced to death. At best you will spend the next twenty years of your life in a penal colony which will make Graz-Karlau look like a holiday resort.”

Her grey eyes remained blank. The man lit a cigarette, an imported brand, and offered her one. It would have bought her an extra helping of food for a week at the prison, but Isa refused it with a barely perceptible shake of the head. 

“Three men found dead. One with his throat slashed to the bone, two shot in the face. Not exactly the behavior you’d expect of a final year linguistics student at a top university.”

From beneath the table he took a flask and two cardboard cups, and poured the tea slowly so that the strong scent infused the cold air. He nudged one of the cups towards her. 

“The Circle of Sons, one of the most violent and ruthless criminal organizations in Austria.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “What were you thinking exactly, when you decided to brutally execute three of their foot soldiers? Was there a reason you only tried to decapitate one of them, and saved the other two the suffering?”

She looked away, her expression disdainful.

“It’s just as well the police found you before the Sons did, or I wouldn’t be talking to you now.” He dropped his cigarette end on the floor and trod it out. “But I have to admit it was an efficient piece of work. Wherever you learned that from, you learned it well.”

She took a moment to study him again. He was a buff man, though not fat. Pepper-haired, light eyes. His gaze was eye level and his eyes were almost, but not quite, sympathetic. 

“You did, however, neglect the most important rule of all—you got caught.”

She took a small, exploratory sip of her tea, and then reached across the table to take one of the cigarettes and light it. “So who are you?”

“I am someone before whom you can speak freely, Isabella Summers. But please, confirm the following: you were brought to an orphanage at age seven, and burnt the place down?” he asked with a cock of his eyebrow. 

“It was one floor, two at most,” she replied coolly. 

He cautiously nods his head, studying the girl in front of him. “You spent eighteen months at the orphanage, during which time the staff noted your exceptional academic skills, along with a near-total inability to form relationships with other children.”

She exhaled, the smoke forming a long grey plume in the frigid air. 

Mikel continues: “When you were ten, you returned to the orphanage, at which point you were discovered writing plans to murder your caretakers in a variety of languages.”

“It made it more interesting,” she replies unflinchingly. 

Mikel ignores her reply and moves on. “Against the advice of your therapist, who had diagnosed you as suffering from a sociopathic personality disorder, you were returned home to your father. The following year you commenced your studies at secondary school, where you once again won praise for your academic results—particularly for your language skills—and it was once again noted that you made not one attempt to make friends or form relationships. You did, however, form an attachment to your French teacher and became extremely agitated when you learned that she had been subjected to a serious sexual assault from her boyfriend. He was arrested but later released for lack of evidence. Six weeks later he was discovered in a woodland area, incoherent with shock and blood loss. They were able to save him, but his attacker was never identified. At the time, you were approaching your seventeenth birthday.”

She put out her cigarette on the wooden floor below them while contemplating Mikel’s statement. “Is this going anywhere?”

“I mean, I could mention the fact that you won a gold medal for pistol shooting in your first year as an undergraduate, but that seems _irrelevant_ , now doesn’t it.”

Machina remained silent, staring up at the plywood ceiling with one single lightbulb hanging from it. “Was this built specifically for this meeting?”

Mikel shakes his head, not falling for her deflection. “Just between ourselves, what did you feel when you killed those men?”

She met his gaze with a perfectly blank expression, her blue eyes relaying absolutely nothing. 

“Alright, how might you have felt _hypothetically_? Killing three men.”

She leaned forward. “Well, at the time, I might have felt satisfaction at a job well done. But now?” she says with a shrug. “ _Nothing_.”

“So for nothing, you are looking at twenty years in Graz-Karlau.”

“You brought me all the way here to tell me that?”

“The truth is, Isabella Summers, is that the world has a problem with people like you. People without a conscience, or the ability to feel any sort of guilt. People with an inability to recognize any wrongdoing. You represent a tiny fraction of the population at large, but without you, the world stands still. Nothing is accomplished. You are an evolutionary necessity.”

There was a long silence. Even though she had always known that she was different, his words confirmed that she was truly unique. _Necessary_ , even. And that felt nice, as little as she wanted to admit it.

“So what do you want from me?” she asked. 

Mikel told her, sparing no detail of what was to come. Listening to him, it was as if everything in her life had led to that moment. Her expression never flinched but a newfound thrill ripped through her as she thought about all the possibilities of this new life to come.

—

In Berlin, the sun is setting as Machina takes a new, boxed MacBook from her desk drawer and unpacks it. From a stack of inconspicuous mail, she removes the postcard she had neatly tucked under a fashion magazine. When she starts the laptop, she presses her pointer finger onto a small scanner next to the keyboard, and she is led to an ancient looking command-line interface. Below a pre-typed boolean, she enters a string of numbers from the postcard, found just above the postage. With one press of the enter button, she is led to a different screen, this time with a single box. 

Again, she opens her desk drawer and pulls out a tiny black light that is the size of a pen. She turns the postcard over, and holds the light up to the upper right hand corner, revealing another tiny string of numbers. She carefully enters them into the computer, and within seconds there is a full profile in front of her. The document is headed _Salvatore Greco_.

One of the unique attributes that recommended Machina to her current employers was her photographic memory. She takes a solid hour to read over the Greco file, and when she has finished, she can recall every page as if it were in front of her. Police files, surveillance logs, court records—everything she could possibly need is safely tucked away in some corner of her mind. 

All things considered, though, the file is frustratingly brief. A timeline of Greco’s career. An FBI psychological profile. A breakdown, in large part hypothetical, of his domestic situation, personal habits, and sexual proclivities. A list of properties held in his name. An analysis of his known security arrangements. 

Machina gazes over the city. She briefly considers Greco’s taste for the finer things. Sets his personal refinement against the grotesque horror of his actions and commissions. Is there any way she can turn this contradiction to her advantage? 

She re-reads the document file, scanning each sentence, for a possible way in. When Greco leaves home to visit his mistress in Palermo, he is invariably accompanied by an armed driver and at least two bodyguards. There appears to be no predictable pattern to these visits. 

One document in particular, though, interests Machina. It’s a five-year-old press cutting from an Italian newspaper, reporting a near-fatal accident sustained by one of the paper’s own journalists in Rome. According to a witness: “I was coming out of a restaurant in Trastevere when a car came racing towards me on the wrong side of the street. The next thing I knew, I was in hospital, lucky to be alive.”

The none-too-subtle suggestion is that this attempt on his life is the consequence of a piece he wrote for the paper a month earlier, about a young English soprano named Florence Welch. In the piece, he criticized Welch for having accepted a donation towards her studies at the Royal Opera House in London from Salvatore Greco, “the notorious organized crime boss.” 

It is a brave and perhaps foolhardy piece of journalism, but Machina is not interested in the witness’ story. Instead, she wonders what inspired Greco’s generosity towards Welch—not that he couldn’t afford an infinity of such gestures. Was it a love of opera, the wish to help a talented girl achieve her potential, or an altogether more basic desire?

An Internet search produces only a couple of pictures of Welch. She is a thin girl, with mousy brown hair neatly done up. She has sharp facial features and piercing green eyes, making her look older than her twenty-three years. She has a basic website, where there is a brief biography and a selection of her performance reviews. On a different tab, there is a list of her scheduled performances for the next few months. Scrolling through the engagements set for places all around Europe, Machina pauses. Her eyes narrow, and she clicks on the hyperlink, which brings up the website of Royal Albert Hall in London. 

—

Isa’s training had taken the better part of a year. 

The worst came first—six weeks of fitness training and unarmed combat on a lonely, wind-scoured stretch of the Essex coast. She arrived in early December when the windchill was bad enough to turn fingers colors they shouldn’t ever be. 

The instructor was a former Special Boat Service instructor named Frank. He was tall and lean, and exceptionally plain looking. His normal outfit, worn in all weathers, was a faded cotton tracksuit and a pair of old trainers. He was merciless. Isabella was underweight and in poor condition following her time in Graz-Karlau, and for the first two weeks, the interminable runs across the marshes with the cold, icy wind whipping across her face, were absolute _torture_.

Determination had kept her going. Anything, even death from exposure on the mudflats, was better than returning to Graz-Karlau. Frank didn’t know who she was, and didn’t care. His brief was simply to bring her to combat readiness. For the duration of the course she lived in an unheated Nissen hut on a mud-and-shingle island linked to the mainland by a quarter-mile-long causeway.

On the first night, Isa was so cold she couldn’t sleep. Eventually, however, she was so tired that her body had no choice but to shut down promptly at 9 pm, just after her final run of the day. Frank kicked the corrugated-iron door open every morning at 4 am before tossing her the day’s rations—usually a plastic canteen of water and a couple of tins of processed meat and vegetables—and leaving her to pull on her t-shirt, combat boots and trousers. For two hours they would run repeated circuits of the island, either across the oozing grey mudflats or along the icy tideline, before returning to the Nissen hut to brew tea and heat up a mess-tin of rations on a small hexamine stove. By sunrise, they would be outside again, pounding the mudflats until Isa was vomiting with fatigue. 

In the afternoons, as the sky would go dark, they worked on hand-to-hand combat. It started slowly, Frank moving in slow-motion as he showed Isa where to aim and how to react, but eventually moved to where they would conduct their practice sessions knee-deep in the sea at full speed. Realizing that her English was poor, Frank taught by physical example. Isa thought she knew a thing or two about fighting, having learnt the basics from her father, but Frank seemed to anticipate every move she attempted, deflecting her blows with casual ease before pitching her tiny body, yet again, into the icy seawater. 

Isabella didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone as much as she hated the ex-SBS instructor. No one, even in the orphanage or Graz-Karlau, had so systematically belittled and humiliated her. Hatred became a simmering rage. She was Isabella Janet Florentina Summers, and she lived by rules that few would even begin to understand. She would beat this man if it killed her.

Late one afternoon in the final week they were circling each other in the incoming tide. Frank had a Gerber knife with an eight-inch blade, and Isa was unarmed. Frank moved first, swinging the oxidized blade so close to her face that she felt the breeze of its passing, and in response she ducked under his knife arm and hammered a short-arm punch into his ribs, It stopped him for a second, and by the time the Gerber came slicing back she was out of reach.

They lunged back and forth, Frank aiming for her chest. However, her body outraced his brain. Half-turning she grabbed his wrist, wrenched him in the direction to which he was already committed, and booted his legs from under him. As Frank fell backwards into the water, arms flailing, she was already lifting her knee to stamp his knife hand into the shingle. As the instructor involuntarily released the Gerber, she fell forward to pin him underwater. Straddling him, she forced his head back with the palm of her hand, and watched the agonized working of his face as he began to drown. 

She thought about killing him for a moment. She really did. Watching the light fade from his eyes just as she had witnessed with Anneke’s boyfriend, and those three Circle of Sons bastards. However, she wanted him alive to acknowledge her triumph, so she dragged him onto the shore, where he rolled onto his side and retched up gouts of seawater. When he finally opened his eyes, she was holding the point of the Gerber knife neatly to his throat. 

“We done here?” she asked plainly in English.

Meeting her eyes, he nodded in submission.

A week later, Mikel came to collect her, looking her up and down with quiet approval while she waited for instructions from him on the muddy track leading to the causeway. “You look good,” he said, his flat gaze taking in her newly confident stance and windburned face. 

Frank returned shortly, handing Mikel a folder of what was probably a report on her progress. “You know she’s a fucking psycho,” he said, oblivious to just how much English she was able to learn just by perusing old magazines in the hut and listening to his instructions. 

“Well, nobody’s perfect, Frank,” she said in reply, her eyes narrowed. 

The following weeks and months were a whirlwind of various courses around the world. Three weeks in Germany for escape and evasion training where she ultimately severed all of a man's forearm tendons following a fight. A month in the U.S. where she was put through an advanced Interrogation program, which was calculatedly nightmarish in order to induce maximal stress. A month of weapons familiarization at a camp in Ukraine, followed by three more at a Russian sniper school. 

All of this was done under various false identities carefully crafted by whoever Mikel’s boss was. It wasn’t long before the deception began to give her a certain heady satisfaction. “Officially, Isabella Summers no longer exists,” Mikel informed her eventually. “A certificate verifies that she killed herself in her cell at Graz-Karlau. District records show that she was buried at public expense in the Karlau cemetery. Trust me when I say that no one misses her, and no one is looking for her.”

Isa sensed herself changing, and the results pleased her. While she was exceptionally sharp before, the training had only made her better. Psychologically, she felt invulnerable. 

After the sniper course, she learned about explosives and toxicology in Berlin, advanced driving and lock-picking in London, and identity management, communications, and coding in Paris. For Isa, who had never left Austria before her appointment with Mikel, the international traveling was exhausting. Each course was taught in the language of the country in question, testing her linguistic aptitude to the limit, and more often than not, leaving her mentally as well as physically drained. 

Throughout it all, patient and caring on the sidelines, was Mikel. He maintained a respectful, professional distance between himself and Isa, but was sympathetic towards her on the handful of occasions when the pressure became too much and she demanded to be alone. “Take a day off,” he had told her on one occasion in London. “Go and explore the city. And start thinking about your cover name. Isabella Summers is dead.”

By November, her training was almost over. She had been staying in a small, modest hotel in Berlin. She was traveling every day to an anonymous office where a young man about her age was teaching her the finer points of steganography—the science of concealing secret information in computer files. On the final day of the course Mikel appeared, paid her hotel bill, and accompanied her to an apartment in Kreuzberg. 

The apartment was furnished with chic, vintage furniture and plain accented decor. Its occupant was a small woman of about sixty, dressed entirely in black, whom Mikel introduced as Johanna. 

Johanna stared at Isa, appeared unimpressed by what she saw, and asked her to walk around the room. Becoming more self-conscious with each passing second in her faded t-shirt and jeans, Isa complied. Johanna watched her for a moment, turned to Mikel, and shrugged. 

And so began the final stage of Isa’s transformation. She moved into a four-star hotel two streets away, and each morning joined Johanna for breakfast in the first-floor apartment. At nine o’clock every morning a car came for them. On the first day they went to the local upscale shoppes, where Johanna would march Isa around the store, ordering her to try on a succession of outfits—daywear, casual, evening—and buying them whether Isa liked them or not. The tight, flashy clothes to which Isa was drawn Johanna dismissed without a glance. 

“I’m trying to teach you Berlin style, not how to dress like a street-walker, which you obviously know how to do already.”

By the end of the day, the car was piled high with shopping bags, and Isa was beginning to enjoy the company of her ruthlessly-critical mentor. Over the week that followed they visited shoe shops and fashion houses, couture shows, a vintage emporium in Northern Berlin, and a costume and design museum. At each of these, Johanna offered an unsparing commentary. This was chic, clever, and elegant; that was crass, tasteless, and irredeemably vulgar. One afternoon Johanna took Isa to a hairdresser. Her instructions to the unbelievably beautiful stylist were to proceed as she chose, and to ignore anything Isa suggested. Afterwards, Johanna stood her in front of a mirror, and Isa ran a hand through her newly dark-blonde hair that was cut to just below her shoulders. She liked the look Johanna had put together for her. The designer jacket, the striped-t-shirt, the low-rise jeans and ankle boots—she looked… German.

Later that night, Isa walked over to the local Jiu Jitsu studio around the corner. She wasn’t trained in the specialty, but she picked it up quickly and loved nothing more than to take down large men who would usually patronize her at first. It was an outlet to get her desire to fight out without actually hurting anyone. 

After taking down a man easily twice her size, she stood up, offering him a hand as he caught his breath. “Fuck,” he cursed in sharp German. “ _Du bist eine Maschine._ ”

Isa smiled as he stood up. “That’s kind. I just used to study a lot as a kid. I was really into it,” she humbly lied. 

The man just shook his head. “I’m calling you _Machina_ from now on.”

Two days later, Mikel came to collect her from the hotel. “About my cover name,” she said. “I’ve chosen it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't going to put this up bc I know people are waiting on Under, but I figure something is better than nothing.
> 
> To be honest, I feel defeated at the moment. Things are... not great where I am, I've had to move back home because of hate groups infiltrating my town, and I'm fighting what feels like a million different organizations that I've been involved in who have gravely disappointed me in the past few weeks in light of everything going on in the U.S. My mental health was not great before all of this, but this has really made it plummet if I'm being honest. I haven't had it in me to work on Under just because reality is horrific enough, so I don't really feel up to writing "realistic" work at the moment.
> 
> Black. Lives. Matter. If you don't understand this statement but want to, please feel free to message me @alwaysdowntohidewithyou on Tumblr and we can have a conversation free of judgement and with love. If you don't like that statement or disagree with it, please stop reading my work. I am a white ally who will not stop fighting this until things change. 
> 
> Like I said above I haven't really been into media that is "realistic," lately, but I have immersed myself in Killing Eve and the book series. This is the result of that. Idek at this point, hopefully you enjoy it.
> 
> https://blacklivesmatter.com/  
> https://secure.actblue.com/donate/naacp-1


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